Misadventures of a girl who will do anything for a little adventure.

11/13/2012

Tracking, Targeted Advertisements, and Your Privacy

I’ve been meaning to put this post together for quite some
time, but a number of different things have stopped me, including the fact that
I’m not the world’s biggest expert by any means.

But still, I have stuff to say about this, so I’m going to
say it.

If you find issue with anything in this post, or want to correct or elaborate on anything I've put here, please do so in the comments and I will update the post. Thanks in advance for your input!

First, I’m going to talk about what targeted advertising
entails. Second, I’m going to talk about the methods of targeted advertising.
Third, I’m going to talk about things you could do about it if you choose to.

There are a lot of class action lawsuits coming up around
tracking and targeting, specifically about using information about what you
look at on one site to target ads on other sites. For example, when I was
buying a lot of goth Lolita dresses, I’d get Milanoo ads showing me the
absolute cutest dresses ever, not just on Milanoo, but on Facebook, Google,
Yahoo, and most of the news sites, magazine sites, and blogs I frequent.

What is tracking?

Tracking can take many forms. At my work, we use tracking for
a lot of things, like improving the experience of a person who visits our site
or improving the number of ad impressions we deliver. On any page, we display
at least two ads. The metric that we watch in order to get a good idea of ad
impressions is pageviews (that is when a page, including the tracking
javascript/code, loads).* For the most part, this sort of tracking doesn’t
store personally identifiable information about you. We don’t store your IP
address and can only see your behavior in a general way, as combined with the
rest of the site visitors. Even if I look at a path with only one person, I
can’t tell if that person is Myra Smith or Susan Sarandon.

Another form that tracking takes is ad-related tracking and
then serving ads based on where you’ve been around the Internet. You might be
surprised to know that anywhere you see the “Like” button from Facebook and the
“Tweet” button from Twitter that your action on that site is probably being
tracked (provided that you didn’t sign out when you left the sites). Every site
that you visit with one of those buttons sends information back to your record
on Facebook’s and Twitter’s servers about your interests. Google stores your
search and browsing history, and I wouldn’t be too surprised if they use the
Google+ button to track you as well. There’s a Chrome plugin you can install
called Privacy Fix that will block the Facebook Like button from appearing.
I’ll talk about that later.

The main thing that tracking is used for is, of course,
profit. It’s easy to see how targeted advertising is far superior to
non-targeted advertising: if you put products in front of people who have
already expressed interest in those products, it’s pretty likely that you’re going
to convince people to cave in and buy that stuff. Similarly, if you put
products in front of people who share common interests with other people, it’s
likely that the targeted people will also share their interest in certain
products.

For example, I’m listed as engaged to my fiancée on
Facebook. He’s a male. As a result, I’m getting a lot of ads for wedding
photography and wedding locations… but I’m also getting ads for children’s
clothing. Even though I haven’t stated that I’m expecting a kid anywhere on my
profile, my demographics (engaged, heterosexual female, 37) make it pretty
likely that I’ll be enjoying a visit from the stork soon. Of course, having
kids is furthest from my mind, but the majority of people in my demographic are, so I get targeted.

When I was play engaged to my friend Laura, I didn’t get
baby ads. I guess lesbians aren’t a good target for baby stuff.

Facebook doesn’t want to waste targeted advertising on
anyone, so they give you the option of controlling what kind of ads you see.
You can thumbs up or thumbs down ads on Facebook to refine the ads you see,
enabling better targeting on you.

Why on earth would you want Facebook to better target you?
Because ads that you’re interested in become content and not ads. Think about magazines… those are just big
advertisements that you’ve self-targeted by buying. Not just the ads, but the
clothes featured, the product reviews, the beauty advice… all of that is about
putting products that you might be interested in at your fingertips.

The difference is, of course, that in a magazine, you would
have to go seek out that adorable skirt from Sack’s, but on the Internet, you
can click in and have it sent to you in minutes.**

There are some reasons I don’t like targeted ads:

They’re very good at making me part with my
money, because companies like Zappos can show me the boots I was drooling over
across pretty much any site I go to.

I have massive amounts of data about me living
on some server and I don’t even know what is stored out there. I can only
imagine that it’s everything. That’s
a little creepy.

Companies like Fab start sending me email all
day long featuring products that I actually really do enjoy looking at, so I
open them, which is a waste of time and a reinforcement of their somewhat spammy
email policies.

When the targeting is wrong (like with the
babies), I feel like they think I’m a cheap and predictable piece of meat
connected to a credit card.

There are some reasons I like targeted ads:

They do feature products I’m actually interested
in, so much so that I’ve actually started looking at ads again. The ads have
become a kind of extra content.

… um, that’s it, actually.

There are some reasons I’m neutral to targeted ads:

Who really cares if someone has all this
information on me and my habits? It’s not like I have anything truly to hide,
and the advertising companies aren’t in any huge hurry to publish my habits,
since then I’d know how much they know. And I’m kind of scared to know.

I have to support the services that I use,
either by subscription or by advertising. There’s no such thing as free
anything. Facebook, Twitter, and Google all provide services that I actually need, so I accept advertising and
tracking as the contract of exchange that I have with these companies. My
habits are currency.

What kind of information is stored? Ah, this is where it
gets amazing. Everything. Facebook
recently did a deal with the companies who manage the data from buyer loyalty
cards. So every time you buy pre-natal multi-vitamins or stretch mark cream at
Ralph’s, Facebook knows you should get more baby ads. Or, at least,
theoretically. I don’t know how integrated the systems are yet. But imagine the
kind of information that could be gleaned by watching every post, every tag on
a photo, every person whose post you
comment on, every article you read
(yes, even that one about Snookie running for president and about early warning
signs of herpes)… I mean, it’s really something.

But as I said above, the companies doing this tracking have
a very serious interest in not letting anyone
know how much they know about you. If you found out how much data they had on
you, it’s likely that you’d be creeped out in the least, outraged at the most.

Ok, but really, who
the hell cares?

This is the question I struggle with all the time. Do I
really care if corporations are amassing huge piles of information about me for
the purposes of getting me to part with my money? Isn’t that more my problem
than theirs?

It’s not all that simple.

I think my general philosophy on tracking is based on the
idea that I’d rather know than not know. And once there’s a huge amount of
information stored about you, well, it’s hard to undo that. What if the
government suddenly decided to take a huge interest in the cross-section of population
that reads Tom Robbins and wears rugged boots? I’d be in a mess of interest.

That’s not to say that ad companies hand over their
information to the government, but since I don’t know whether they do or not, I
assume they would.

It’s just a lot of trust to put into people who know all
your secrets.

So what can you do?

As I mentioned, it’s impossible to know how much information
is being stored about us and how complete a picture that the companies have
about us. That’s why the methods of stopping tracking are inexact for the most
part.

Go to Facebook’s brand page settings and like a bunch of
stuff you don’t like: https://www.facebook.com/pages
Unfortunately, this is the best way to “opt out” of Facebook targeting. It
still won’t stop tracking you across third party sites and they’ll still base a
lot of your targeting on your posts and your friends’ posts, but at least it’ll
throw a significant wrench into their algorithm.

The bad side of liking stuff you don’t like is that all your
friends think you’re a huge Land’s End and Ritz fan. And then they also get
targeted based on the fact that you liked those things… which is probably for
the best anyways.

I guess it’s worth noting here that I actually give Google
almost unlimited information about me. Why? Oh, I don’t know. I have no
justification at all, actually. Which leads to my most important point….

Accept the terms of
use that by using the site, you agree to be tracked and targeted. The CEOs
of the companies doing the tracking are unapologetic because they should be.
This is their business. Their employees aren’t volunteers and they’re not
working out of their garages, they have massive
infrastructures. Every time a site like Facebook, Google, or Twitter goes down,
people freak out, but without the targeting (and the targeted advertising draws
much more money than non-targeted advertising), outages would be so frequent
the services would become unusable.

So why didn’t I lead with that? Well, y’all are my friends
and I assume that the readership on this post is going to be so minute as to
not make even a drop in the bucket of the revenue of any of these companies.
It’s my gift. :)

If you want to take action about tracking, the President of Consumer Reports, Jim Guest, just sent my dad a note with a petition, which you can find here.

* Many years ago, pageviews used to be a pretty good
indicator of impressions, but since HTML has come a long way in the last 10
years, it’s not necessary to reload the page to reload an ad. It’s possible to
change the ads based on your actions, and not just the action of changing
pages. For example, slideshows like those on Martha Stewart don’t refresh the
whole page when you switch from one page to another, but rather just refresh
the ads and the slide you’re looking at. This makes it a lot quicker to look at
multiple slides, because you’re not waiting for the page to reload and you
don’t have to scroll down to look at the slide.

For this reason, I don’t think pageviews are the be all, end
all of metrics that they used to be. Omniture has created code that you can
refresh through javascript to show a page refresh, even though the whole page
didn’t reload, but some advertisers don’t recognize this. In addition, ads that
expand on mouse over sometimes don’t work correctly in pages that don’t fully
reload (this is an issue here at my work), so advertisers who rely on fly-out
ads aren’t going to be able to advertise on these pages. It comes down to
balancing the needs of the advertisers against the user experience.

This is a vast oversimplification of what is called “Usability.”
Our job as Product Managers is to make your experience as enjoyable as possible
while still meeting our business needs. We use metrics delivered through
tracking suites like Omniture and Google Analytics to figure out where people
are getting excited and clicking quickly through content or getting frustrated
and clicking away. Among my favorite parts of Product Management is going
through the analytics and measuring them against success metrics (like
increased pageviews and pages-per-visit).

** This is a huge part of what a retail product manager
does… they make the process of arriving at the product you have been targeted
to the point of sale as seamless as possible, so you hardly have a chance to
realize what you’re doing before you click “confirm” on that final order page.
It sounds sinister, but it isn’t. You actually do want that adorable dress and you’ll be drooling at the door in 5
– 7 business days. Product managers just make that decision process much
quicker.

Comments

I’ve been meaning to put this post together for quite some
time, but a number of different things have stopped me, including the fact that
I’m not the world’s biggest expert by any means.

But still, I have stuff to say about this, so I’m going to
say it.

If you find issue with anything in this post, or want to correct or elaborate on anything I've put here, please do so in the comments and I will update the post. Thanks in advance for your input!

First, I’m going to talk about what targeted advertising
entails. Second, I’m going to talk about the methods of targeted advertising.
Third, I’m going to talk about things you could do about it if you choose to.

There are a lot of class action lawsuits coming up around
tracking and targeting, specifically about using information about what you
look at on one site to target ads on other sites. For example, when I was
buying a lot of goth Lolita dresses, I’d get Milanoo ads showing me the
absolute cutest dresses ever, not just on Milanoo, but on Facebook, Google,
Yahoo, and most of the news sites, magazine sites, and blogs I frequent.

What is tracking?

Tracking can take many forms. At my work, we use tracking for
a lot of things, like improving the experience of a person who visits our site
or improving the number of ad impressions we deliver. On any page, we display
at least two ads. The metric that we watch in order to get a good idea of ad
impressions is pageviews (that is when a page, including the tracking
javascript/code, loads).* For the most part, this sort of tracking doesn’t
store personally identifiable information about you. We don’t store your IP
address and can only see your behavior in a general way, as combined with the
rest of the site visitors. Even if I look at a path with only one person, I
can’t tell if that person is Myra Smith or Susan Sarandon.

Another form that tracking takes is ad-related tracking and
then serving ads based on where you’ve been around the Internet. You might be
surprised to know that anywhere you see the “Like” button from Facebook and the
“Tweet” button from Twitter that your action on that site is probably being
tracked (provided that you didn’t sign out when you left the sites). Every site
that you visit with one of those buttons sends information back to your record
on Facebook’s and Twitter’s servers about your interests. Google stores your
search and browsing history, and I wouldn’t be too surprised if they use the
Google+ button to track you as well. There’s a Chrome plugin you can install
called Privacy Fix that will block the Facebook Like button from appearing.
I’ll talk about that later.

The main thing that tracking is used for is, of course,
profit. It’s easy to see how targeted advertising is far superior to
non-targeted advertising: if you put products in front of people who have
already expressed interest in those products, it’s pretty likely that you’re going
to convince people to cave in and buy that stuff. Similarly, if you put
products in front of people who share common interests with other people, it’s
likely that the targeted people will also share their interest in certain
products.

For example, I’m listed as engaged to my fiancée on
Facebook. He’s a male. As a result, I’m getting a lot of ads for wedding
photography and wedding locations… but I’m also getting ads for children’s
clothing. Even though I haven’t stated that I’m expecting a kid anywhere on my
profile, my demographics (engaged, heterosexual female, 37) make it pretty
likely that I’ll be enjoying a visit from the stork soon. Of course, having
kids is furthest from my mind, but the majority of people in my demographic are, so I get targeted.

When I was play engaged to my friend Laura, I didn’t get
baby ads. I guess lesbians aren’t a good target for baby stuff.

Facebook doesn’t want to waste targeted advertising on
anyone, so they give you the option of controlling what kind of ads you see.
You can thumbs up or thumbs down ads on Facebook to refine the ads you see,
enabling better targeting on you.

Why on earth would you want Facebook to better target you?
Because ads that you’re interested in become content and not ads. Think about magazines… those are just big
advertisements that you’ve self-targeted by buying. Not just the ads, but the
clothes featured, the product reviews, the beauty advice… all of that is about
putting products that you might be interested in at your fingertips.

The difference is, of course, that in a magazine, you would
have to go seek out that adorable skirt from Sack’s, but on the Internet, you
can click in and have it sent to you in minutes.**

There are some reasons I don’t like targeted ads:

They’re very good at making me part with my
money, because companies like Zappos can show me the boots I was drooling over
across pretty much any site I go to.

I have massive amounts of data about me living
on some server and I don’t even know what is stored out there. I can only
imagine that it’s everything. That’s
a little creepy.

Companies like Fab start sending me email all
day long featuring products that I actually really do enjoy looking at, so I
open them, which is a waste of time and a reinforcement of their somewhat spammy
email policies.

When the targeting is wrong (like with the
babies), I feel like they think I’m a cheap and predictable piece of meat
connected to a credit card.

There are some reasons I like targeted ads:

They do feature products I’m actually interested
in, so much so that I’ve actually started looking at ads again. The ads have
become a kind of extra content.

… um, that’s it, actually.

There are some reasons I’m neutral to targeted ads:

Who really cares if someone has all this
information on me and my habits? It’s not like I have anything truly to hide,
and the advertising companies aren’t in any huge hurry to publish my habits,
since then I’d know how much they know. And I’m kind of scared to know.

I have to support the services that I use,
either by subscription or by advertising. There’s no such thing as free
anything. Facebook, Twitter, and Google all provide services that I actually need, so I accept advertising and
tracking as the contract of exchange that I have with these companies. My
habits are currency.

What kind of information is stored? Ah, this is where it
gets amazing. Everything. Facebook
recently did a deal with the companies who manage the data from buyer loyalty
cards. So every time you buy pre-natal multi-vitamins or stretch mark cream at
Ralph’s, Facebook knows you should get more baby ads. Or, at least,
theoretically. I don’t know how integrated the systems are yet. But imagine the
kind of information that could be gleaned by watching every post, every tag on
a photo, every person whose post you
comment on, every article you read
(yes, even that one about Snookie running for president and about early warning
signs of herpes)… I mean, it’s really something.

But as I said above, the companies doing this tracking have
a very serious interest in not letting anyone
know how much they know about you. If you found out how much data they had on
you, it’s likely that you’d be creeped out in the least, outraged at the most.

Ok, but really, who
the hell cares?

This is the question I struggle with all the time. Do I
really care if corporations are amassing huge piles of information about me for
the purposes of getting me to part with my money? Isn’t that more my problem
than theirs?

It’s not all that simple.

I think my general philosophy on tracking is based on the
idea that I’d rather know than not know. And once there’s a huge amount of
information stored about you, well, it’s hard to undo that. What if the
government suddenly decided to take a huge interest in the cross-section of population
that reads Tom Robbins and wears rugged boots? I’d be in a mess of interest.

That’s not to say that ad companies hand over their
information to the government, but since I don’t know whether they do or not, I
assume they would.

It’s just a lot of trust to put into people who know all
your secrets.

So what can you do?

As I mentioned, it’s impossible to know how much information
is being stored about us and how complete a picture that the companies have
about us. That’s why the methods of stopping tracking are inexact for the most
part.

Go to Facebook’s brand page settings and like a bunch of
stuff you don’t like: https://www.facebook.com/pages
Unfortunately, this is the best way to “opt out” of Facebook targeting. It
still won’t stop tracking you across third party sites and they’ll still base a
lot of your targeting on your posts and your friends’ posts, but at least it’ll
throw a significant wrench into their algorithm.

The bad side of liking stuff you don’t like is that all your
friends think you’re a huge Land’s End and Ritz fan. And then they also get
targeted based on the fact that you liked those things… which is probably for
the best anyways.

I guess it’s worth noting here that I actually give Google
almost unlimited information about me. Why? Oh, I don’t know. I have no
justification at all, actually. Which leads to my most important point….

Accept the terms of
use that by using the site, you agree to be tracked and targeted. The CEOs
of the companies doing the tracking are unapologetic because they should be.
This is their business. Their employees aren’t volunteers and they’re not
working out of their garages, they have massive
infrastructures. Every time a site like Facebook, Google, or Twitter goes down,
people freak out, but without the targeting (and the targeted advertising draws
much more money than non-targeted advertising), outages would be so frequent
the services would become unusable.

So why didn’t I lead with that? Well, y’all are my friends
and I assume that the readership on this post is going to be so minute as to
not make even a drop in the bucket of the revenue of any of these companies.
It’s my gift. :)

If you want to take action about tracking, the President of Consumer Reports, Jim Guest, just sent my dad a note with a petition, which you can find here.

* Many years ago, pageviews used to be a pretty good
indicator of impressions, but since HTML has come a long way in the last 10
years, it’s not necessary to reload the page to reload an ad. It’s possible to
change the ads based on your actions, and not just the action of changing
pages. For example, slideshows like those on Martha Stewart don’t refresh the
whole page when you switch from one page to another, but rather just refresh
the ads and the slide you’re looking at. This makes it a lot quicker to look at
multiple slides, because you’re not waiting for the page to reload and you
don’t have to scroll down to look at the slide.

For this reason, I don’t think pageviews are the be all, end
all of metrics that they used to be. Omniture has created code that you can
refresh through javascript to show a page refresh, even though the whole page
didn’t reload, but some advertisers don’t recognize this. In addition, ads that
expand on mouse over sometimes don’t work correctly in pages that don’t fully
reload (this is an issue here at my work), so advertisers who rely on fly-out
ads aren’t going to be able to advertise on these pages. It comes down to
balancing the needs of the advertisers against the user experience.

This is a vast oversimplification of what is called “Usability.”
Our job as Product Managers is to make your experience as enjoyable as possible
while still meeting our business needs. We use metrics delivered through
tracking suites like Omniture and Google Analytics to figure out where people
are getting excited and clicking quickly through content or getting frustrated
and clicking away. Among my favorite parts of Product Management is going
through the analytics and measuring them against success metrics (like
increased pageviews and pages-per-visit).

** This is a huge part of what a retail product manager
does… they make the process of arriving at the product you have been targeted
to the point of sale as seamless as possible, so you hardly have a chance to
realize what you’re doing before you click “confirm” on that final order page.
It sounds sinister, but it isn’t. You actually do want that adorable dress and you’ll be drooling at the door in 5
– 7 business days. Product managers just make that decision process much
quicker.